Rainy Days and Mondays...

I think I'll go for a short post tonight, since I don't feel like putting in a lot of effort.

My Introduction to the Old Testament class has been more interesting than I expected, and perhaps interesting in different ways than I expected. A lot of what we've covered I had picked up along the way—from source criticism, which I learned about when I took EfM in high school, to the formative nature of the exodus narrative to the people of Israel, which was a subject in my sophomore seminar at St. John's. What's been most helpful to me has actually been the immersion into the Old Testament. I've always found it difficult to get a broad sense of what the Old Testament was about... how all those genaeologies and stories about kings and those weird lesser prophets fit together. Our course has focused a lot on the historical shape of the narrative; we have discussed both the narrative as it appears in the Scriptures, and also the historical context as it's been put together from other sources. This broad view has helped me to integrate my understanding of the Old Testament into a more cohesive picture of the whole. I'm starting to see how the law relates to the histories, and the prophets to them both. Taking Hebrew at the same time has certainly contributed to my understanding; knowing a little something about the language allows me to see the perspective of the authors a little better.